A Poet of Lost Causes

This chapter studies Vallejo’s last poems in which he set out to celebrate a group of subjects who defended the “communist idea” to the last consequences. In fact, the subject of Vallejo’s poetry ends up being, above all, a subject of the will. Although his verses always set out to represent the fragile condition of subjectivity, and although they never shy away from recognizing how the subject cowers before the event, his poetry also confirms that there are latent political possibilities in humanity, forces that invite us to overcome the limits of our social determinations.